Spill response base open house draws a crowd to Port Alberni’s waterfront

Almost 200 people joined Western Canada Marine Response Corporation (WCMRC) in Port Alberni to celebrate the grand opening of their new spill response base.

The team at WCMRC offered tours of their new base on Harbour Road on Tuesday, June 13. Construction work began in earnest on the new spill response base back in 2020, after a couple years of uncertainty around the Trans Mountain Expansion Project.

The base has actually been in operation for more than a year, said communications manager Michael Lowry, but crews wanted to wait until the moorage at Water Street Dock was complete before they invited the public to tour their facilities.

“So people could get the full picture,” explained Lowry.

With the new moorage, WCMRC now has nine vessels, although two of them are stored on the west coast in Ucluelet. Vessels are all different sizes and functions, some of which were purpose-built to handle the rough west coast waters. The largest is the 80-foot coastal response vessel the Coastal Sentinel, which can sleep 12 people on board.

The base is one of a number of new bases constructed across Vancouver Island as part of the WCMRC’s $150 million expansion project associated with the Trans Mountain pipeline. With the new bases, WCMRC expects to double its capacity and cut response times to marine spills in half.

The spill response team in Port Alberni was pressed into service just last summer when a fishing vessel sank near Hocking Point in the Alberni Inlet, and the crew also worked on the Bligh Island shipwreck near Nootka Sound.

“We’ve also worked with the Coast Guard,” explained Erik Bowkett, the base operations manager for WCMRC Port Alberni. “Sometimes it’s just going out and assessing a situation—it doesn’t always involve a spill response.”

The team has also been undergoing training exercises and some simulated oil spills to ensure that they are ready to deploy their equipment if a spill does occur.

“In the event that there is a big activation, we have people trained and ready to go all over the place,” said Bowkett.

Lowry describes the base as being set up like a fire hall, with change rooms and lockers for staff to get ready quickly in the case of a spill. The base includes a warehouse and a “mini” command post as well as some equipment trailers that Lowry calls “mini hardware stores on wheels” that can be deployed for shoreline spills. Visitors also had the chance to tour WCMRC’s various vessels on the base and at the Water Street Dock down the road.

The Port Alberni base employs 20 people, said Lowry.

Western Canada Marine Response Corporation uses a “cascading model” of resources, where they can bring equipment in from any of their bases in British Columbia to support a spill.

“Depending where the spill is, we’ll mobilize from one of the bases,” said Lowry. “This base is meant to serve the west side of Vancouver Island.”

One of the projects that WCMRC shared with visitors last week was the company’s Coastal Mapping Program, which maps out at-risk areas on Vancouver Island before a spill occurs and creates strategies to protect them. This mapping program was built using input from the community, said Lowry.

“When we talked to the community and First Nations communities, people wanted to be more involved in spill response,” said Lowry. “They wanted to be more involved and they wanted us to be more transparent.”

The community response to the grand opening on June 13 was “fantastic,” Lowry said. The team saw a total of 190 people come through the doors.

“There were 40 people at the door within the first 10 minutes,” said Lowry.

elena.rardon@albernivalleynews.com
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